"A Spy in Europa - a short story by Alastair Reynolds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

A Spy in Europa - a short story by Alastair Reynolds



A Spy in Europa
a short story by Alastair Reynolds
Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free-fall
before the flitter's engines kicked in, slamming it away from the
Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft toward the moon below, quickly
outrunning the other shuttles which the Martian liner had disgorged.
Europa seemed to be enlarging perceptibly; a flattening arc the colour of
nicotine-stained wallpaper.
"Boring, isn't it."
Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. "You'd rather they were
shooting at us?"
"Rather they were doing something."
"Then you're a fool," Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers.
"There's enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red
spot. What it would do to us doesn't bear thinking about it."
"Only trying to make conversation."
"Don't bother - it's an overrated activity at the best of times."
"Alright, Marius - I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it,
filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a
fucking two-hundred page report on it. Satisfied?"
"I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature."
But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity
masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves
were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure
in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the
Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it
into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then
he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.
"Not too late to abort," Mishenka said, a long time later.
"Are you out of your tiny mind?"
The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. "We've all heard what
the Demarchy do to spies, Marius."
"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"
"I'll leave being psychotic to you, Marius - you're so much better at it."
Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all
day.
They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear,
tuning his holographically-inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms;
lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner's passengers was
a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag - nothing incriminating
there; no gadgets or weapons - and exited the flitter, stepping through
the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the
soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin,
stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.
To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly
poor. Vargovic's cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger